INDIANAPOLIS – Senate Democratic Caucus Chair Karen Tallian (D-Ogden Dunes) filed a pair of bills aimed at protecting Hoosier workers and their families. The first bill addresses workers’ compensation and increases benefits for injuries on the job by two percent each year over a three-year period. The second bill creates a taskforce to examine employee misclassification and payroll fraud.

“The backbone of this state are our working people,” Sen. Tallian said. “Both of my bills address protections for Hoosier workers and are clearly bipartisan issues.”

“Last session, my workers’ compensation bill gained support from both parties and was passed out of the Senate. It did not make it through the House of Representatives, but I am confident this year that we can make some progress on this necessary policy. These benefits are normally on a schedule for yearly increases, but those increases stopped a few years ago. It is clearly time to increase benefits to make sure workers aren’t shortchanged.

“My second bill addresses a topic that came out of the Employment and Labor Interim Study Committee with bipartisan support and has been recognized as a problem for years. Many times businesses wrongly classify employees as independent contractors, allowing the company to get out of providing benefits and paying payroll taxes. This practice hurts those employers who play by the rules and are impaired in their ability to compete. It also costs Indiana millions in payroll tax revenue. My bill simply creates a multi-agency taskforce to stop this fraud.”